It's Ada Lovelace Day! Time to celebrate women in technology. Last year I wrote about some local women in tech as well as a personal hero of mine. This year, I've selected three of my favourite talks by science and tech-y women at TED.
Jill Tarter
Perspective is a very powerful thing. Perspectives can change. Perspectives can be altered. From my perspective, we live on a fragile island of life, in a universe of possibilities. For many millenia, humans have been on a journey to find answers, answers to questions about naturalism and transcendence, about who we are and why we are, and of course, who else might be out there. Is it really just us? Are we alone in this vast universe of energy and matter and chemistry and physics? Well, if we are, it's an awful waste of space. But, what if we're not?
Jane McGonigal
In fact, I believe that if we want to survive the next century on this planet, we need to increase that total dramatically. I've calculated the total we need at 21 billion hours of game play every week. So, that's probably a bit of a counterintuitive idea, so, I'll say it again, let it sink in. If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week, by the end of the next decade.
Nalini Nadkarni
Canopy-dwellers are not just insignificant bits of green up high in the canopy that Tarzan and Jane were interested in but rather that they foster biodiversity contribute to ecosystem nutrient cycles, and they also help to keep our global climate stable. Up in the canopy, if you were sitting next to me, if you turned around from those primary forest ecosystems, you would also see scenes like this. Scenes of forest destruction, forest harvesting and forest fragmentation, thereby making that intact tapestry of the canopy unable to function in the marvelous ways that it has when it is not disturbed by humans.